Movies that burn

Forget slide nights, it's now possible - and affordable - to whack the holiday video onto a DVD and screen it in Aunty May's loungeroom.

I marvelled the first time I stored a file on a cassette recorder that was plugged into my Commodore 64 and, even more marvellous, got it back.

Since then, we have had, in rapid succession, big floppies, little floppies (which are not at all floppy), various Zip-type cartridges - which are little floppies on steroids - and CDs, both writeable and rewriteable.

And all the time their capacity has grown larger to accommodate the enormous volumes of data we now regard as normal.

Big floppies have long gone and little floppies are in their death throes. In the Mac environment, floppies were consigned to the great technology graveyard about four years ago. Today, CD burners are pretty well mandatory and CDs, together with online storage and retrieval systems, such as Apple's free mac.com service, supply our needs.

CDs are great. For about 60 cents you can buy about 650MB of space on which to store your data or music. That's six times more than a Zip cartridge and 450 times more than a small floppy. And, when you're sick of it, you have a coaster on which to rest your coffee cup. ");document.write("

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Or, for a little more money, you can use CD-RW discs and rewrite up to 1000 times before you send the disc on to coffee-cup purgatory.

But wait. Is 650MB enough? These days you need a really big bucket, because now you're making, editing and storing movies and albums of digital photographs - thousands of them, more than the kings of suburban slide shows ever dreamt could be crammed into a single, riveting evening.

And so we come to DVD - once called digital video disc, then digital versatile disc and now just DVD. But who cares what the letters stand for: they will hold 4.7 gigabytes of stuff, seven times more than a standard CD.

You can add music, too, so you don't have to keep darting back to the stereogram and flipping those vinyls of Mario Lanza. Perhaps best of all, you don't have to blunder blindly around among your carousels to find that great shot of Aunty May leaning on the Tower of Pisa. The system will find it for you.

Moore's Law is working, too: prices are plummeting. Not long ago a standard DVD-R disc cost about $30. Today Apple sells them for $11 each in packs of five and the other names in the business, such as Pioneer, TDK and Sony, are competing.

It is also now possible, if you visit one of the computer swap meets around the country, to find DVD-RW discs for less than $8. They're made in Taiwan and, while I cannot attest to their quality, users say they work pretty well. Bear in mind also that DVD has a number of formats. DVD-R is not the same as DVD+R and the same goes for the rewriteable discs.

The optical drives in which you burn DVDs are also fast becoming affordable. There was a time when just the burner cost $5000 or more. Today, they are about $2000. But a top-of-the-line iMac or G4 Power Mac comes with the SuperDrive, a Pioneer-made optical device that reads and writes CDs and DVDs - so now you can get the burner and the iMac for about $4000.

You also - and only with Macintosh - get iDVD 2, the software that Apple provides, so that you can burn the holiday video you edited in iMovie 2 on to a DVD and send it to the rellies, who will be able to play it on most modern domestic DVD players. Apple has a list of compatible players on its Web site (apple.com/dvd/compatibility).

Is burning a DVD difficult? We asked Danny Gorog and Eliot Swart of Digital Survival (www.digitalsurvival.com.au), a Melbourne Macintosh training group, to take us through the steps and list some handy tips.

First, they say, check the Web for a wider variety of transitions and sound effects than comes with the iMovie 2 software provided with the Mac. You'll find them at apple.com/imovie/plugin.

Check your final edit, render the movie to optimise slow-motion clips and other effects and save the file to your movies folder.

Then, open iDVD, create a project and select a theme. The themes button has three tabs, allowing you to select one of the pre-built Apple themes, customise them or build something new by dragging in a background image or a piece of the movie. An audio file can be dragged in as well.

Using Mac OS X 10.1.5, you can start the Mac on the fairly long process of encoding your movie file in MPEG format and burning the disc - and continue to use the machine to do other work while the DVD is being written.

One point to note: iDVD 2 is designed to work only with iMac and Power Mac G4 computers fitted with SuperDrive. If you have a third-party burner connected to your Macintosh, you will need to buy Apple's DVD Studio Pro, which is a much more comprehensive authoring program than iDVD 2.

DVD Studio Pro can also be used to prepare files on digital tape or a portable hard drive.

Apple says iDVD 2 accepts movies in QuickTime format, which is supported by most video-editing and creation tools. Still pictures can be in any QuickTime-compatible format, such as PICT, TIFF, or JPEG. There's a special option in iMovie 2 to save your movie in the format that's correct for iDVD 2. But iDVD 2 will not accept MPEG movies as source material.

MPEG (named for the motion-picture experts group) is the industry standard format for compressing large digital video files. The DVD standard requires files to be in MPEG format and iDVD 2 does the compression automatically as it saves to the DVD disc.

Some handy tips from the folks at Digital Survival: before you start work in iDVD 2 open the preferences menu and make sure you define your project as PAL - NTSC won't work on an Australian TV set. You can also use this drop-down menu to turn off the Apple watermark if you so choose.

Then, make sure you select the "TV safe" area so that your production fits the proportions of your TV screen.

With all of that done, the rellies are putty in your hands. Just sit them down, turn on the DVD player and they'll think you're Cecil B. DeMille reincarnated - well, possibly.